Video

[9:25]Character Customization w/ artist Mark Bloom

Steven: This is Mr. Matt Broome, one of our senior character artists

Matt: Hello, I’ll take that

Steven: So you’ve been building the base character model that’s going to be used for the humans. When people get to that character customization screen when they get into Ashes, they’ll be referencing from this point how they want their character to look.

Matt: They’re basically going to start with this generic male, who’s in incredibly good shape, and there going to make decisions on what’s perfect for them.

Steven: Because he’s not already perfect in that shape

Jeffrey: Everyone has a different perfect

Steven: So your taking that perfect model and people can grow into an overweight / skinny / non-muscular person if they want to.

Matt: If they’re that tank class we want to give them the ability to turn into a tank. You have to see it to believe it. We want people to have that kind of customization so people can do that.

Jeffrey: That’s where a lot of character comes from to, it’s what your physical presence is, it gives you a quick picture of who this person might be.

Matt: Absolutely, you want that big imposing silhouette, but some might be that stealthy fighter

Steven: I see on the screen behind us an early rendition of that character

Matt: What we did was we got a technically sound base character to begin with, we’re working on getting that lean, body type and that becomes the target to get up to that tank or stealthy character. It’s like your anatomy guy 101 but we’re really focused on realism. Right now we’re sculpting in the details, but as we get close to the finish line his muscles will become more organic, more like a real person.

Steven: What type of customization functionality will people have when determining body type? Will they be able to become scarred, change musculature of face, have a longer nose, higher brow

Matt: We’ve got to give them all that. We want them to be able to go in there put a scar on one eye, have one blue eye, one red eye, we want them to be able to make each character what they want. Give them different eye types is something we can do. We can beat up the armor, change little details. We want people to feel like an army but we want them to have little details that say something about their journey.

Steven: Is this the base face?

Matt: This is the base face in progress. This is really the early days of the clay sculpt. This is about how strong the character is. This is about the region of the world the character is from. Since this is our universal male you really want him from everywhere. As you get to some of our other races, some of the angelo, middle eastern, african, asian characters, the structure starts to change, cheeks shrink, eyes get smaller, eyes get longer, jaws get wider, with that european male. So this is the center of our universe before we scale out.

Steven: When he says things like European male or Asian male it’s not that we have those in our game, but it’s that those are the inspirations we’re drawing from to make this human character.

Matt: It goes back to the character customization screen. You’ll see a face that will be on the screen that will be your neutral target, and you’ll start moving sliders around and be able to identify that person that your playing with. It’s about flexibility in customization as opposed to pigeon holing a character with just one character model.

Jeffrey: A lot of the stuff that’s up here in the background is a lot of how we get from that base male to adonis over there.

Matt: This is a complex design meeting we’re having where people were talking about everyone will have amazing armor sets, and how can we put details on those armor sets. The discussion was how would we drive that from the base male adding more customization details and have a front end system on how we can get hair styles, skin colors, and how we can get some of the Tulnar mixed in with the humanoid males and mamilions. This is about how we pull that universe together, give the flexibility that felt like we where giving a lot of customization to the players but not break the visual integrity of what we’re going for with that.

Steven: What your establishing here and working on this master mesh is that if you need to change something you go back to the original, back to the master

Matt: The whole idea with this was we’re driving all of our technical decisions from a technically sound male mesh and female mesh and that allows us to scale up to these humanoid mammalian characters. Then we were talking about we have a few material types to drive the 3 complex parts of the system. Represented by 1, 2, and 3.

The base character race with no armor

The character with armor details

The accoutrements you can put on that characters

Steven: You’ve mentioned the Tulnar. They’re very different from our other races in the game. The other races aren’t going to be able to bring in reptilian or mammalian or humanoid attributes and scale them for character customization like the Tulnar will. What is the means by which the character creation screen is going to be implementing those types of scales to bring in the mammalian fur perhaps on some of the same textures.

Matt: It’s going to be awesome because it will drive from the same system. To the end user it looks like fur, but to us it looks like three dimensional geometry. We’re really just changing the details of the geometry and at runtime we’re telling what material to put on the geometry. That’s what so great about our system. We’re building a system that doesn’t make decisions for the end user. We’re building a system that supports many choices for the end user. That’s one of the things that is exciting about Ashes. Every decision early on is making sure we’re not telling the user who to be, what race to be, what to wear, how to wear it, we’re trying to give them as much flexibility as possible and they can be the main decider.

Jeffrey: I’m really excited about this. The power of this system and the ability on a design level to really be able to pull from all sorts of different things, and get some characters that really pop on the NPC and story side of things. It makes my imagination go crazy, because I don’t have to give the artist 2 months to make a character, I can just give the details and make someone really cool looking that hasn’t been seen before, and I can do that quick.

Matt: The best games come from those designer decisions. People don’t play games with depth to get more art. They’re getting art that supports the role and story they’re telling through gameplay. Our job is to give the options that give the flexibility to the designers that support their vision of the world.

Jeffrey: That’s exactly what this is doing. I can’t wait to start playing.

Steven: I think that one of the great things, as you were saying the mission of Ashes of Creation and our other design systems and mechanics, is that player driven customization. That’s where the construction of the world comes from, it only makes sense that we’re going to have the most capability possible with our character creation system that’s going to allow players to have a unique identity that they’re capable of creating for themselves through their avatar.

Jeffrey: It’s also really performant too. That’s something we’ve been talking about a lot. We do want that variation but we don’t want that variation to kill the player experience. That’s what this allows. It all comes back to one place. One space. We don’t blow up our memory, we don’t bring a machine to tears. This is all something that is super doable.

Matt: We can make the most amazing youtube videos ever, but at the end of the day we have to deliver a game to the players. It’s got to work. If we’re not playing it everyday like we do now we can’t deliver a game that’s going to work.

Steven: Potentially, once we have our character creation system setup and ready to go for certain races, perhaps that’s something we’ll open up to the player base early to begin to save character profiles. There’s been a few other games that have done it, but I really enjoy contests around unique character creations. If we give these tools to the playerbase it’s fun to see what they can come up with.

Matt: It’s cool because it's another layer of transparency. It’s another way to get things in front of the players as fast as possible to get feedback as fast as possible. What’s more exciting than get a real time snapshot of who your going to be in the world and it builds anticipation of who your going to be in the universe.

Steven: We really are spending a lot of time and effort towards making a fully in depth character creation system and I think our players are going to enjoy that.

Classes

[21:45] Tank

Abilities

Taunt

Ability for tank to draw aggro from target.

Single

Cone AOE

Control the battlefield

[23:30] Cover ability / Wall

Force enemies to engage him.

Slam a foot and construct a wall behind or beside him that will put a condition modifier on enemies that come in contact.

Pull skill / Lasso

Pull the target to you.

[25:30] Shield Bash

Damage dealing and Condition stun effect

Can offer aide, puts the shield to sky , party damage goes to him.

[26:50] Keystroke time frame.

Weapon use ability

Sword and Board, initiate attack with weapon, will have the opportunity to do a keystroke within the right window of time that will let him use his shield, and another keystroke to smash again which will be an ultimate effect

Superhero jump (better name later)

Jump and Lasso of multiple targets

Utility Skill

Lets you contribute in a way that isn’t necessarily damage.

Tanks is a perception check.

Determine in an area

What will aggro

An ambush

Strategic with placement due to cooldown times

[32:50] Cleric

Don’t want them to be 1 dimensional healers where they sit in the back and tap heals.

Master of Life - Staff wielding upfront and personal

Abilities

Targeted spot heal. Along with a heal over time with also a proximity damage over time to nearby enemies

Life balance AOE as a template

Enemies will have life removed

Allies will have life restore based on life removed.

[35:30] Group balanced life affect

Averaging out hitpoints

Bring everyone to an equal health

Chain heal effect

Target a member and launch a line of heals towards them can jump from allied members will deal burst damage to enemy in proximity to the target.

Increases potency based on how many allies it affects.

Endow life

Resurrection skill

Short duration buff that will resurrect them upon death.

If player is dead, regular long cast rez without buff.

[38:00] Ultimate Skill

Divine form

Grants party member within proximity a Heal over time and increases heals and damage over time

Cleric will rise off their feet

Last about 5 seconds

Utility

Purge - Cleansing

Clears out a curse from a building.

[40:40] Mage - Spellbook Ranged DPS weapon

Abilities

Fireball Fastcast targeted spell that does damage with the potential to light targets on fire.